Sony’s Gaikai Cloud Initiative to be Unveiled “Soon”

October 10, 2012
Written by Jesse Meikle

When Sony acquired the cloud gaming company ‘Gaikai’ for a wallet-busting 380 million dollar bargain earlier this year, a lot of us assumed the buyout was a safe-guard for the future, potentially inspired by a desire to grab Gaikai before competitors such as Microsoft or Samsung could. Of course, gamers were nevertheless erratically excited by the huge array of possibilities laying at Sony’s feet upon Gaikai’s acquisition, and today we have a little more fuel for that fan driven fire courtesy of their Q&A page:

The future looks pretty bright for Gaikai. Our growing team is working on a number of exciting initiatives that we can’t wait to unveil. We can’t share the details now, but we will soon.

Though many suspect Sony won’t begin to push offsite computed gaming until after the PS4 arrives, this quote provides us hope that cloud gaming will be implemented sometime in the not necessarily distant future, in a wide range of ways, personally I’d be excited to see Sony leverage Gaikai to:

Stream instant game demos to the PS3, no more lengthy downloads!

Stream full PS3, or PS4 games to the Vita, Bravia TV’s or Sony certified (PS Mobile) Android devices.

Stream PS4 demos to the PS3 in order to tempt us into jumping ship to Sony’s next generation console.

Stream PS3, Vita, or Ps4 demos to any smart phone, Smart TV, or internet browser, in an attempt to draw everyone behind a screen into the world of PlayStation.

Buy a game on the PS3, Vita, or PS4, then gain the ability to play it on any device you own.

Of course, this overly optimistic, sickeningly speculative article wouldn’t be complete without a very vague, hype-friendly quote from Gaikai themselves:

Gaikai has developed the highest quality, fastest interactive cloud-streaming platform in the world—a platform capable of delivering games and other interactive content instantly to consumers via the Internet. By harnessing the power of the cloud, and the strength of our engineering talent, Gaikai will help SCE grow their ecosystem, empower developers with new capabilities, dramatically improve the reach of various content and bring breathtaking new entertainment experiences to end-users around the world.

The sky’s the limit – when do you think Sony will implement the cloud, and how do you expect them to wield this promising (albeit still infantile) technology?